Making presentations and conducting meetings are important aspects of many occupations. Executives make presentations to directors, managers conduct meetings with staff, salespersons make presentations to potential customers, doctors conduct meetings with nurses, lawyers make presentations to juries, and so on. A great many professionals conduct and attend meetings and presentations regularly. Much effort therefore goes into creating and delivering effective presentations and preparing for and conducting effective meetings.
With specialized software, conventional personal computers provide effective platforms for creating and conducting presentations and meetings. Currently available presentation program modules can turn a personal computer into a customized presentation system for creating and delivering slide presentations. Generally described, these presentation systems provide a specially designed, user-friendly, pallet of tools to assist in the creation of presentation slides to be subsequently displayed to an audience. These presentation systems also allow the slides to be sequentially presented to an audience, point-by-point and slide-by-slide, with color, animation, audio, and transition effects that enrich and enliven the presentation.
Presentations usually involve the use of visual aids such as slides. These slides contain information related to the subject of the presentation and can include text, charts, graphs and pictorial images. Many of these slides are created on computers using various computer programs. Slide presentation programs are computer programs that enable a user to create, edit, manage, and perform “presentations” on a computer. One example of a popular slide presentation program is Microsoft PowerPoint.RTM., available from Microsoft Corporation, of Redmond, Wash. Another powerful presentation tool is Lotus Freelance. A slide presentation includes a set of electronic “slides,” each slide corresponding to one screen or page of output. An electronic slide may also be converted to a 35 mm slide or overhead transparency and displayed in a standard slide projector or overhead projector. Each slide contains one or more objects, such as text, graphical images, or graphical animation. A slide may also include a sound object that is played when the slide is displayed during a “slide show” performance.
A slide presentation program performs a slide show by sequentially displaying a series of slides contained within the slide presentation. The slides are displayed on a display screen, which may be part of a computer monitor or a separate surface onto which an image is projected. During a performance of a slide show, a speaker controls the performance by invoking commands to advance the slide show. A command to the slide presentation program can be entered using a keyboard, a mouse, or other suitable input device. Alternatively, an author of a slide presentation can include slide “timings” with each slide. A slide timing corresponding to a slide indicates the number of seconds that the slide is displayed before the slide presentation program automatically advances to the next slide. During a performance of a slide show, the slide presentation program automatically advances to the next slide when the existing slide's timing ends.
A slide can include one or more display objects that are incrementally displayed during a slide show. For example, a slide may initially appear with one bullet item. Sequential advancement of the slide show causes additional bullet items to be displayed Display objects, such as bullet items, that are incrementally displayed are referred to as “builds.” Builds??
Presentation program resources have been developed to aid a user in developing a slide presentation. Each slide presentation contains a number of slides that display information, such as text, to an audience. In addition, each slide presentation can contain links to data (linked data) stored in an external source, such as a spreadsheet. The external source is referred to as a link source.
A link contains both a representation of the linked data and a reference to the linked data. The representation contains a static snapshot of the linked data, and as such, the representation must be updated periodically to reflect changes made to the linked data. Accessing the linked data via the reference to retrieve the latest version of the linked data performs an update. The representation is a pictorial representation, like a bitmap that describes a screen graphic, of how the linked data appeared on the computer display as of the last time the representation was updated. For example, when the linked data is a range of spreadsheet cells, the representation of the linked data would be the actual graphical depiction of the range of spreadsheet cells as it appears on the computer display. An example of a reference to linked data is a file name with a path and an indication of the specific linked data within the file. For example, the reference “C:.backslash.spreadsheets.backslash.financial.xls|A1:F1” indicates that the linked data comprises the cells “A1:F1” in the spreadsheet with the file name “financial.xls” at path “C:.backslash.spreadsheets.” When the representation is displayed, the representation is displayed to the audience as an integrated part of the presentation.
Computer programs often have associated data files that are processed by the computer program during a normal execution of the computer program. A data file can contain information that is processed and presented to a user either in a video presentation or an audio presentation, or a combination of video and audio. Slide presentation programs are examples of computer programs that process an associated data file.
Many times there is a need to modify or update a presentation slide. There may be new information related to the particular subject matter in the slide. The creation of a slide presentation usually consists of generating original slides and compiling these new created slides into a new slide presentation. Although this method of slide creation has proven to be sufficient, many large organizations have personnel in different physical locations that may conduct presentations on the same or similar subjects. In addition, many of these people may be located at different geographic locations. Furthermore, one person may want to include a slide from another person's slide presentation. There may be times when persons may want to share or exchange various presentation slides. To facilitate this exchange of slides, there can be a slide repository, from which users can search the repository, select slides, and incorporate the selected slides into the user's presentation. In addition, these repositories can be located in server computer on a computing network. At the present time, the slide presentation software has constraints on a user's ability to create slide presentations by downloading slides from other locations. There can also be limitations in related to transferring the slides from one location to another location over a computer network.
In many cases, the displays may be part of a larger set of displays. This situation is often seen with presentation slides. Slide presentations can contain multiple slides that are presented in a predetermined sequence. For example, a user can assume that a server stores a repository of 1,000,000 PowerPoint slides stored in the JPEG file format. As a user attempts to create a slide presentation with slides from this repository, the user may need to navigate through a large volume of slides in order to select the ones that the user desires for the presentation. The current method to perform this task is to manually review each slide and compile a set desired slides based on the review. For each desired slide, the user would need to display the slide on a screen, copy that slide and store the copy in a slide file in another location. This method of displaying and manually copying slides is tedious and inefficient. In addition, in large repositories, the user may not be able to return to the same location in the repository they were before downloading a particular slide.
In case a hotspot on a downloaded slide points to another slide that was also downloaded, this hotspot will still be active between the downloaded slides. In case a hotspot on a downloaded slide points to another slide that was not downloaded, this hotspot will still be active, but in this case the hotspot will cause the user's WebBrowser to launch and take the user to the slide in the described repository on the network.
There remains a need for a method and system that can enable a user to efficiently create a slide repository arranged such that a user can store slides in a configuration that will enable any user to easily navigate through the slide repository and locate the desired slides for review and use. In addition, the method and system should provide for the repository to be located on a computer network and for the user to be able to load slides into the repository from a remote location.